The End of the Summer
by Fuwakateema
Summary: When you sit in a chair all summer, fall comes before you notice and you have been thirty-eight for two days.


Title: The End of the Summer  
  
Author: Jess (fauquita@hotmail.com)  
  
Category: Sam-central.  
  
Disclaimer: Characters belong to ABS.  
  
Spoilers: Anything is game.  
  
Rating: G  
  
Summary: When you sit in a chair all summer, fall comes before you notice and you have been thirty-eight for two days.  
  
Thanks: Tater-Jo, you know you rock my world.  
  
Note: Based on the short story, 'Nobody Listens When I Talk' by Annette Sanford. Also, this is not a Sam-leaving type story. Just a short little introspective piece. Game on.  
  
  
  
Locate me in a chair. Leather, comfortable, the kind bought at Ikea or maybe it was Office Max. I am spending the summer, my thirty-seventh, but the first I have spent in a chair. I could say I'm here because I have a headache (it's true I do have pain) or a broken leg, or a very strict boss. I could say that I prefer to be alone, that I am meditating, that I am mentally preparing a speech that will bring the masses to their feet. I could say a lot of things, but no one listens anyway, so I don't. Talk. Not much anyway. And it is beginning to worry people.  
  
Toby, for instance. He hovers. In the doorway, in the mess, occasionally beside my desk. He wears a perfectly pressed suit that I know he's spent the night in, and he clutches his notebook like a shield.  
  
"Sam," he says, "you should be out doing things."  
  
Doing things to him means lowering the poverty rate, or at the very least raising minimum wage. Doing things to me means spending the weekend in a Frank Lloyd Wright house, or water-skiing, or driving a motorcycle down the California coast. To him, a man in my position should be thinking of ways to change the world every waking moment, but honestly I think he'd be happy to see me do the Electric Slide if it would get me on my feet.  
  
I stay still. I don't want to do his kind of thing, and I can't do mine. The fact is I don't seem to fit anywhere right now. Except in an office chair. So here I am, playing solitaire and surfing the Internet.  
  
Josh arrives in the evening. He has driven all day in a car where the air conditioner is broken. He flops in the visitor's chair and channels my mother in that freakish way he has sometimes.  
  
"Sam," he says, "a guy like you ought to realize how lucky he is."  
  
Lucky to him means being thirty-seven without having had my pulmonary artery collapsed. He thinks because I don't have any visible scars that I am whole, and healthy, and that I am not haunted by what could have been.  
  
From time to time, CJ comes. I give her half my desk to perch on, and she cracks her knuckles. She can do that and still look great. She's the kind of woman who can blink her eyes and make men fall dead.  
  
"Sam," she says, " a man like you needs someone to share his life with."  
  
She will get me a date with her neighbor. With her sister-in-law's cousin. With the waitress at the Georgetown bar we frequent. She will fix me up with a woman, and we will have dinner and wait impatiently for dessert so we can go our separate ways.  
  
I could say, I'm not that kind of guy at all. I could say, I'm a loner, and I don't need anyone.  
  
Who would listen?  
  
So I say, "No." I say, "Maybe next week." Then I sit in my chair and watch the interns busy themselves in the bullpen and wonder why I didn't go.  
  
When you sit in a chair all day, you remember a lot. You close your eyes and listen to the bustle in the hallway, and think about who you are.  
  
You think of you at five, crying in the closet because your brother has laughed at your letter to Santa Claus. You wrote it in secret, and now you destroy it because you have learned the truth.  
  
You think of riding in the backseat with your older brothers and feeling safe because you are all together and your parents aren't fighting. You think of your first school dance when you are twelve, and the aftershave you stole from your brother's room, and the way the kids laughed at you when your date refused to go near you.  
  
When you sit in a chair all day, you live in another world. You rock back and forth and listen to the music the leather makes in protest, but you aren't really you.  
  
You are a divorced man who still wears his wedding band. The balding, slightly-overweight bearded one who puts his commas in the right places, and who has never been sailing because he can't swim.  
  
You are a too-tall woman with great legs and sad eyes who blames herself for every misspoken word, every pause, every nervous gesture on camera.  
  
You are the survivor of a gun shot wound and sometimes your shirt doesn't cover the tip of the scar left behind when they cut your chest open to save you.  
  
And sometimes, you are an economics professor who only got into the race to keep his opponent honest. And you laugh at the irony.  
  
When you aren't really you, then the who that you are is different somehow; strong and an integral part of everything. You are a riddle with thousands of answers, a song with thousands of tunes.  
  
When you sit in a chair all summer, fall comes before you notice and you have been thirty-eight for two days.  
  
It is time to get up.  
  
I lean against Toby's doorjamb and yawn. He is reading the paper and grunting over an article. I could say, don't worry about the state of the world. When the time comes, I can change it. I've been watching for years.  
  
On the TV, the weatherman is predicting rain and Josh moans into his beer bottle. I could say, I really am, like you said, lucky. Instead, I pull out my wallet and order another round.  
  
CJ is on the phone even though she's just down the hall, and she tells me about the new deputy counsel who thinks I'm, in her words, cute. I could tell her, the only woman I want is painfully oblivious, I could say, wake up CJ and let me take you to dinner.  
  
I don't though. It hurts too much. And besides, no one listens when I talk.  
  
Sometimes, not even me.  
  
~Fin~ 


End file.
